Civil engineers at UC Berkeley have reached an agreement with Caltrans that will allow them to simulate the recent 7.1-magnitude earthquake on a block-long segment of the double-decked Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. A one-mile section in the Cypress structure portion of the freeway collapsed onto the lower roadway during the Oct. 17 earthquake, killing 41 people. The rest of the structure is scheduled to be torn down by the end of the year.

May The Times' headline ("Transitway Work Hits a Roadblock," Metro, Feb. 25) about the second deck of the Harbor Freeway now being constructed be propitious. Memories of the recent Nimitz Freeway second-deck pancake and the deaths of all those motorists caused by the Loma Prieta earthquake seem short. The Harbor Freeway parallels the Newport-Inglewood Fault (Long Beach Earthquake, 1933), which is only 3 miles away, and other major faults are very close (Whittier Fault, San Gabriel Fault)

A UC San Diego structural engineer on Thursday blamed the Nimitz Freeway collapse on cracks in the ill-designed joints that connected the double-decked roadway to its massive, reinforced support columns. Speculation on what caused the bridge in Oakland to collapse in Tuesday's Bay Area earthquake has focused largely on the bridge's support columns.

Vast stretches of viaducts and freeways crippled by the Loma Prieta earthquake more than a year ago are still waiting for repairs, their abandoned structures mocking worsening traffic below. Almost a quarter of the city's highways, including one of the nation's most intricate systems of bridges and ramps, are closed and scheduled for refitting or demolition. For the next four years, officials say, Bay Area motorists will see more freeway construction--$1.

October 28, 1989 | JOHN HURST and RICHARD C. PADDOCK, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

A top Caltrans official acknowledged Friday that the department had been warned 2 1/2 months before an earthquake destroyed the Nimitz Freeway that structures with similar designs in the Bay Area were vulnerable to quakes. James E. Roberts, Caltrans' chief of structures, also acknowledged for the first time that the double-decker freeway in Oakland that collapsed Oct. 17, killing at least 39 people, might have been saved with existing technology.

As if Bay Area emotions were not already tattered enough, residents were shaken awake Thursday by powerful and destructive pre-dawn aftershocks, but as the day went on there was good news in the collapsed rubble of the Nimitz Freeway and the return to some routines of normal life. Crews digging with jackhammers and cranes found many fewer cars than expected crushed in the rubble of the Nimitz Freeway's upper deck, which collapsed on motorists below in Tuesday's catastrophic 6.9-magnitude quake.

Caltrans Director Robert K. Best on Wednesday said it will cost about $1.5 billion to rebuild state and local roads damaged in the Bay Area earthquake and outlined a proposal to compensate victims of the Nimitz Freeway collapse. Best, testifying before a special hearing of the state Senate Transportation Committee, said the federal government will cover at least half and probably more of the state's rebuilding expenses.

A gasoline truck, a potential inferno in its belly, was amazingly intact, resting beneath a section of the Nimitz Freeway's upper level that miraculously stood while other parts of the roadway fell. Nearby, a BMW sat unscathed, as shiny as a showroom special. These were the exceptions, the remnants of normality amid an almost unimaginably grotesque scene of crushed bodies, mangled steel and crumbled concrete. As many as 250 vehicles may have been trapped under the rubble.

As rescuers ever so slowly untangled the dead from the wreckage of an Oakland freeway Thursday, clusters of loved ones of the missing gazed up at the ruins with agony in their eyes. "I have hope as long as there are people still working, as long as we know there are air pockets up there, I have hope," said Daniel Rubi, whose 28-year-old son was believed to have been on the Nimitz Freeway when part of it collapsed in Tuesday's earthquake.

Saying she was "in pain and very angry," the widow of a man killed in the earthquake collapse of the Nimitz Freeway called on the state Tuesday to "honestly and openly" investigate the disaster and prevent it from happening again.

A man who claimed God told him he could drive through cars with his flatbed truck collided with 18 vehicles and injured about 12 people Saturday on the Nimitz Freeway, authorities said. A two- to three-mile section of highway was littered with dented vehicles before Emmett Wheat, 47, hit the center divider with his truck. An 8-year-old girl suffered the most serious injuries when she was thrown from her mother's van when it was struck.

Jim Roberts, a gruff-talking engineer who is happiest poring over bridge designs and calculating stress and load factors, has been thrust by the Loma Prieta earthquake into the unlikely role of an international celebrity. Since the Oct.

Caltrans would have known that the Nimitz Freeway was likely to collapse in a major earthquake if the department had performed a comprehensive seismic study of the double-decked highway, an independent investigation of the disaster concluded Thursday. But with funds short and priorities placed elsewhere, the state transportation department never ordered such a study, dooming the Nimitz to collapse in the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that shook the San Francisco Bay Area on Oct.

Engineering tests on a still-standing segment of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland have confirmed that a relatively simple strengthening of a mile-long elevated section could have prevented its collapse in the Oct. 17 Bay Area earthquake, Caltrans officials said Tuesday.

There were just a few days left until Christmas, but Broadway was eerily quiet. Foggy sidewalks that should have been bustling with holiday shoppers were nearly deserted because the Emporium, Oakland's biggest department store before the October earthquake, was dark. And in West Oakland, the city's oldest and poorest neighborhood, a pair of shivering security guards stood watch at the last surviving piece of the tragic Nimitz Freeway collapse.

Earthquake victim Julio Berumen, 6, a survivor of the Cypress Freeway collapse, was home in Richmond from the hospital sporting a green satin Oakland A's jacket given him by pitcher Dave Stewart. Julio was released from Children's Hospital in Oakland Friday, delaying his departure long enough to meet Stewart, his baseball hero, who showed up at a playroom to give out autographed caps and pictures. Stewart then gave Julio his own team jacket. Julio made headlines after the Oct.

Gov. George Deukmejian on Tuesday convened his special commission to investigate the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway and the Bay Bridge in the Northern California earthquake, asking the board to determine why the failures occurred and whether they could have been prevented. "The people of our state are entitled to a comprehensive, thorough and objective examination of the failure of these structures," Deukmejian told the panel.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. When a major earthquake strikes in California, state officials expect to see plenty of damage. Broken water mains flooding streets. Cracked gas lines setting off fires. Older brick buildings crumbling to the ground. But freeways and bridges are supposed to stand up under the shaking, with only some buckling and cracking of the concrete. No one among the state's top road and bridge engineers thought that a major freeway would simply collapse.

Caltrans engineers are closing in on a way to strengthen several elevated San Francisco highways similar in design to the portion of the Nimitz Freeway that collapsed in the Bay Area earthquake. The relatively simple solution would probably have prevented the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway's Cypress Viaduct, which killed 42 people in the 7.1-magnitude quake on Oct. 17, James Roberts, chief of structures for the California Department of Transportation, said Thursday at a meeting of Gov.

A 6-year-old survivor of Oakland's Nimitz Freeway collapse during the Oct. 17 earthquake has been fitted with an artificial left leg and "is in high spirits," a therapist said. Julio Berumen was given the replacement at Children's Hospital, where he has been since he was freed from the flattened wreckage of his mother's car. His mother was killed and his 9-year-old sister was injured.